Antoine Louis Manceaux (1862-1939) The Sculptor Jean-paul Aubé And The Statue Of Shakespeare

Antoine Louis MANCEAUX
(Calvi, 1862 - Beauvais, 1939)
The sculptor Jean-Paul Aubé working on the plaster of a statue of Shakespeare
Oil painting on canvas formerly mounted on cardboard
H. 72 cm; 59 cm
Signed in red lower right and dedicated "to Mrs. P. Aubé"

Exhibition: Salon of 1884, no. 1612 - A corner of a sculptor's studio

The features of the sculptor Jean-Paul Aubé (Longwy, 1837 – Capbreton, 1912) are known to us from the pastel portrait that Gauguin made of him in 1882, at the same time as his son Emile. A student of Antoine-Laurent Dantan and Francisque Duret, and a friend of Carpeaux and Falguière, Jean-Paul Aubé distinguished himself during the Third Republic, which commissioned him to create statues representing the glories of France, beginning with an immense monument to Léon Gambetta that earned him the Legion of Honor. A recipient of numerous medals at the Salon, Aubé went on to become a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. Plaster studies for two of his statues appear on the left of our painting: The Harvest, displayed in a public garden in Nantes, and Dante, installed in front of the Collège de France. As for the monumental effigy on which the artist is working here, it is a full-length representation of Shakespeare, which does not appear to have been commissioned by the public. But Aubé exhibited this plaster model at the 1884 Salon under number 3257. The young Manceaux, who had spent his youth in Corsica before attending the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, presented this portrait of Jean-Paul Aubé that same year, simply described as "a corner of a sculptor's studio." This was his first participation in the Salon, whose catalogue lists him as "a student of Cabanel and Aubé." Was Jean-Paul Aubé truly his teacher, or rather his first Parisian patron? We know that he had chosen Manceaux as the model for his Joubert Exciting His Troops, a monument intended for Bourg-en-Bresse. Later, Manceaux would refine his skills with Jules-Élie Delaunay and Gustave Moreau, before going to work in Beauvais where he would be a drawing teacher and collaborator at the tapestry factory for over thirty years.